These complaints have their biblical antecedents: Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books is a distraction”; and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps growing.” After the invention of the printing press around 1450 and the attendant drop in book prices, according to some estimates by as much as 80 percent, these complaints took on new meaning. As the German philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder put it in the late eighteenth century, the printing press “gave wings” to paper.

Complaints about too many books gained particular urgency over the course of the eighteenth century when the book market exploded, especially in England, France, and Germany. Whereas today we imagine ourselves to be engulfed by a flood of digital data, late eighteenth-century German readers, for example, imagined themselves to have been infested by a plague of books [Bücherseuche]. Books circulated like contagions through the reading public. These anxieties corresponded to a rapid increase in new print titles in the last third of the eighteenth century, an increase of about 150 percent from 1770 to 1800 alone.

Ultimately, it’s how we deal with this information that is important, and Wellmon further shows that much of the ways that we deal with the information around us also have their antecedents throughout history (see, for example, the section titled “Enlightenment Reading Technologies”). Of course, information deluge changes many of the facts around us as well (this essay makes a fine preamble to The Half-Life of Facts) but seeing how we have been getting overwhelmed with information and have dealt with it since ancient times is fascinating.

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